She’s of the girl variety and completely awesome even though she was up from 1am – 4:30am last night. *sigh* Look at that face! Yes, you may have a pony….

Other than that completely consuming pastime, I’ve been ramping up my freelance work and, well, that’s pretty much all the time I have. I have missed cheesemaking, though. So, when a publisher offered to send a book to review with recipes, I said, “yes, please!”

I got Janet Hurst’s Homemade Cheese and in between naps and feeds, dug in. It’s a lovely book in full color with chapters about cheesemaking, the different components of cheese, interviews with cheesemakers and recipes with gorgeous photos of farms, animals, cheeses and  dishes made with those cheeses — positively mouthwatering! I figured this was a good opportunity to get the women of FUCheese together and try one of the recipes.

We chose halloumi. If you’ve had halloumi, you’ve probably had it fried — it excels at this! It won’t fully melt but gets warm and bubbly and lightly toasted on the outside. It’s perfect on its own or in a sandwich or on a salad. Major plus for this recipe is that it looked very easy: 1/2 gallon of milk, rennet and salt were all that was needed.

Image from Pease Pudding who also has a halloumi recipe!

A couple things stood out in this recipe — one, it required the milk to only come to a fairly low temperature, 86°. That took no time at all, excellent! Two, it required a lot of rennet — we made a double batch so added 1 tsp of rennet. I feel like most of our other recipes have required much less. Lastly, what really made this stand out were the instructions to return the drained curds to the whey for a second heating. Interesting!

Well. Things did not turn out well, actually. After setting with the rennet for 30 minutes we tested for a clean break. Nope. Just the barest hint of firmness. We entertained ourselves with other things (involving beer and grilled cheese… more on that later) and waited another 30 minutes. Hmph. Slightly firmer. We re-read the recipe — how was the cheese supposed to sit? We had moved it off the burner and covered the pot. We consulted another cheese book on their recipe for halloumi — this one stated that it should sit at temp for the 30 minutes. We took the milk’s temp and it was in the high 80s still. We waited some more. No clean break, not really. We set it aside and pondered (and there was more beer and grilled cheese). We decided to warm it up some more. We quickly overheated it to around 95° and then set it aside. A total of about 3 hours later and you could tell it was firming, there was a definite sense of a clean break but just no way that this curd could be cut in a way that resembled “1/2-inch cubes.”

After the ladies went home, I ladled out the curd and set it to drain. It was really loose and just didn’t feel like it would knit at all. There was curd all the way to the bottom of the pot but it didn’t seem like it was going to come together and I couldn’t see any success in re-heating the curd in the leftover whey. So, I threw in the towel and dumped it. We’ve never done that!

So, I have some thoughts on this recipe….

In consulting some other recipe sources I found one that suggested adding mesophilic starter and another that suggested adding yogurt with live cultures. This takes it out of the realm of the dead simple cheese but these additions may give it more firmness and stickiness — halloumi is meant to be a firmer cheese. Another consideration is my rennet. If I can find the time, I’m going to test it to see if it’s still doing what it’s supposed to be doing. I admit, it is pretty old. So, even though we did ultimately get curd, it wasn’t firm enough — maybe my rennet has lost its oomph. Another recipe I consulted dissolved the rennet in much less water — 1/2 tsp vs 1/4 cup.

I really want to try to make this again as it looks like one of those fantastic recipes that gets you from milk to cheese in no time flat. Plus, halloumi is delicious! So, we’ll make another go of this one for sure. And given all these variables, I’m not ready to write off the recipe yet. Hopefully we can revisit this sooner than a year from now.

Anyway, do check out Hurst’s book — I think it is a really fantastic overview book that gives you a little taste of everything. I think it would be a great gift book for the cheese lover in your life as the information is really accessible and the photos are so delectable and inspiring. Plus, there’s a recipe for Devonshire Cream!

Homemade Cheese by Janet Hurst
available from Amazon, of course!

I really wanted to do it with fresh goat milk but fresh milk is somewhat tricky to come by. If you have a little extra time on your hands and can drive out into the country, you can get fresh goats milk. We did discover someone inside the city limits selling goat milk from his little herd. We’ll be investigating this further for sure. When we did chevre back in ’08, we drove thirty minutes south of town to a goat farm in Molalla. The milk we got from there was incredible. But, I didn’t have time to drive out there and waited too long to even call and inquire. Then we discovered that one of the local food co-ops sold raw, unpasteurized goat milk from Fern’s Edge Dairy, a dairy outside of Eugene, Oregon. They also make their own cheese and I always snap up their chanterelle-coated chevre when I see it – so fantastic!

The milk was rather pricey – $8/half gallon (Oy!) but was really quite rich and creamy. We bought two gallons and made a double batch following the recipe in Ricki Carroll’s Home Cheese Making. There’s a note at the end of the recipe that states if the curd does not firm up, to add calcium chloride to the milk before the starter. Well. We weren’t going to waste $24 of goat milk for flabby curds! Since we had some on hand we used it. Wow! We had really firm curd. It was totally awesome. I took video, actually, of the curd cutting because I think it’s one of the hardest things to understand when you get into cheesemaking – just what the curd is supposed to look like and what it means when it says to wait for a “clean break.” I need to download my video though and play with it. I’ll do a followup post.

We drained the curds for about 45 minutes before weighing it – 48 ounces! Totally unexpected. Now, that included some whey that still needed to come out but the recipe said the yield would be 1 pound. So…? I’m not sure but I’m going to say that it was the great quality of the milk.

Next, we divided it among the four of us to take home, drain for a few more hours and then salt and age. We had quite a discussion about making a brine verses not. The recipe says that you should not brine if your goat milk does not come from a farm as it will disintegrate. I’m guessing that has to do with pasteurized goat milk? It’s not clear. I’ve decided to salt my curds, let them age for a couple days and then put them in brine. We made a whey/salt brine using the leftover goat whey (you can see a jar of it in the background above) and I plan to use that. But, I’m also going to do a little more research into the brine and make sure this will be okay. Will followup with tasting notes!

All in all, it was actually a really simple recipe. We had a lot of fun and agreed that this would be a good thing to make again. There’s two waiting periods in the recipe where it says to keep the milk at 86-degrees for an hour each time. I just put the lid on and covered it with a towel – seemed to have no problem maintaining the temperature. I think next time we do this we’ll make yogurt during those waiting times. Mmmm… yogurt. It’s been awhile since I’ve made that. So good. Must do that again soon.

Claudia did a mozzarella demonstration for us and she was absolutely charming and very clear. She has a great, relaxed attitude about cheesemaking — you can’t mess it up! While cheesemaking is a science it is very often an inexact science so it helps to have a cheerful can-do attitude for when things go a bit sideways. I picked up some great tips from her and look forward to sharing them when Nicole and I do our own mozzarella demo for some friends next month — eek!

Claudia is planning to be at the Wedge Festival (be there!) with her kits and may also do a ricotta demonstration on the main stage. Kits are such a great way to jump in to cheesemaking, I highly recommend picking one up. You can find out on her website which stores in Oregon are selling them or order from her etsy shop. They would make such great gifts!

Also, if you want to get notified when Foster & Dobbs do their next DIY cheesemakers meeting or to hear about any of their other many events, sign up for their mailing list!

The main steps in making cheese are generally heating the milk followed by cutting the curds and then draining the curds to get rid of the whey. The less moisture in the cheese, the firmer and denser the cheese will be and the longer it can age. If you are making cheese at home, any of these steps can seem daunting, but sometimes the thing we have the most trouble with is the seemingly simple task of setting it up to drain properly.

The most obvious thing to do would be to have a hook in your ceiling over your sink which would allow the whey to flow right down the drain or be captured in a stock pot for another use. However, because of the soffit in my kitchen and the placement of the sink under it, this proved impossible. You may have other limitations. This post is a roundup of some of the devices we have conjured to drain our cheese.

For our huge mozzarella/ricotta/whey day experiment, I came up with the “brilliant” idea to use an old camera tripod. It worked, for sure, but was a little crazy and took up a lot of space.

One day, at the grocery store, I came across this jelly strainer. And I thought that this might work even better and be a little more compact. We used it for draining our cheddar.

It actually worked pretty well. The jelly strainer is essentially a hoop with three legs that screw into it. The legs have a little foot and you can perch it on top of a modest sized stockpot. Bonus is that it is easy to store away.

When we did our goat cheese day and made two batches of fromage blanc, one with fresh goats milk and one from cow, we kind of scrambled around to figure out how to hang them. I don’t think I had the jelly strainer at that time and, anyway, it wouldn’t have worked for two. So, we ended up improvising by hanging the cheese from a broomstick, balanced between a bult-in and a desk. Not pretty, but it worked!

When we made mascarpone, the directions said that we should allow the cheese to drain in the fridge. Hmmm… another conundrum. We ended up with a colander, a wooden spoon and a casserole dish to catch the whey. Really, I could have just balanced it on a stockpot but I couldn’t fit that in my fridge at the time. Any other kind of bowl which will allow the whey to flow away would work as well.

Lastly, if you have the right kind of cabinet handles in your kitchen, you could fashion some kind of hook and hang the cheese from the cupboard handles. Here I’ve used a chopstick to hang the draining cheese over a pot between my closed cupboard handles.

Granted, the drawback here is that you’ve made accessing your cabinet a bit of a pain and, for a small kitchen like my own, I wouldn’t want to give over such prominent counter space for a long draining session. However, if you draining overnight something like this could work in a pinch.

Would love to hear of any inventive ways that you’ve drained your cheese. Just putting this together has inspired in me to once again go looking for a spot where I could hang a hook just for this purpose.

UPDATE! Just saw this post from Urban Cheesecraft for draining cheese using a banana hanger — brilliant!

We decided to give mascarpone a go along with another batch of yogurt – who knew they were so closely related?  We did two batches of mascarpone, both from Ricki Carroll’s book.  One used a packet of direct-set creme fraiche starter and the other with tartaric acid.  Each of these recipes was very easy and something that could be tackled in your home kitchen in a few hours.  The mascarpone made with culture required you to heat the milk to 86 degrees and then let sit for 12 hours.  It can be drained in the refrigerator for a few more hours if a thicker consistency is wanted.  The mascarpone with tartaric acid required a 185 degree initial temperature before adding a 1/8-1/4 teaspoon of tartaric acid (I added a little over 1/8 of a teaspoon).  Once the tartaric acid has been mixed in thoroughly it is set to drain in a colander for 1 hour.  I actually let it drain for about 4 hours.

The results, while successful in both recipes, were clearly vastly different from each other.  The mascarpone with culture came out looking and tasting like mascarpone cheese that I’ve bought at the store.  It had a thicker, cream cheese consistency with that delicious tart yogurty like tang.  A much richer taste overall then the mascarpone with tartaric acid.   The tartaric acid mascarpone came out much more liquidy – although this might have been remedied if I’d let it drain even longer than I did.  While the flavor was fresh and pleasant it was fairly bland and still tasted very much like heavy fresh cream.

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Mascarpone Meets Spring!

Take one chocolate panini from Portland Pearl Bakery sliced, slice fresh strawberries and sprinkle with a little sugar, spread mascarpone onto chocolate panini and layer with sliced strawberries.  Easy and supremely delicious.

For those interested in making it a bit more complicated might I suggest sprinkling the strawberries with a little high quality balsamic vinegar or stirring in a little vanilla with the mascarpone – or both if you are feeling fancy.

Even just the basic recipe made a delicious treat after a long day of work and had the benefit of feeling like a splurge without all the effort that that usually requires.

* * *

Making Tiramisu

Amanda here — with my share of mascarpone, I had in mind to make the tiramisu recipe from The Cheese Lover’s Kitchen Handbook by Juliet Harbutt. However, I could not resist the lure of the gorgeous strawberries showing up at the grocery store even though I know they are not in season. So, I omitted the lady fingers and brandy and used strawberries in place — a sort of summer tiramisu.

I used up all of my mascarpone. The one made with creme fraiche starter was firmer, more textured and had the underlying flavor of cream cheese. The one made with simple tartaric acid stayed soupy and very bland. Nonetheless, I mixed them together and the flavor, with the eggs and sugar and berries and grated chocolate was divine. I shared it with the neighbors across the street and we sat on their deck, under the stars and gobbled it up in a matter of minutes.

You can see all of the steps and a better explanation of the recipe in my Flickr set. I would totally make this again. With the starter, the mascarpone was very easy to do and had a really fresh and light flavor which gave the tiramisu a real liveliness. Tiramisu requires chilling for at least an hour or as long as 24 hours so this would be a great dessert to make ahead of time. The mascarpone can sit refrigerated for at least a week.

I probably won’t post every time I make another batch of yogurt as it’s so easy and I have a feeling that I have a lot of yogurt making in my future. But, for this batch, we took the yogurt making another step further by using a starter from our last batch.

For our first foray into yogurt making, we followed Dr. Fankhauser’s wonderful recipe, with great results. We used an organic whole milk and Nancy’s yogurt. Nancy’s is an Oregon brand, made in Springfield since the 1960s. It’s my preferred yogurt and I buy a lot of it every year. The first thing I did with our delicious batch after sampling it was to portion out 8 oz. of it into an ice-cube tray to freeze and serve as the starter the next batch. After frozen, I put them in a plastic baggie where they’ve been sitting for over a month.

The day before I was going to make yogurt, I transferred the cubes to a covered bowl in the fridge and let them thaw out. I considered all the whole milk options at my local New Seasons and decided to give Alpenrose a try. They are also a local, Portland metro, dairy who has been in the milk business for over 90 years. In addition to that, they have a wonderful grounds where they have built a replica “frontier town” for kids and families to play in, they have a baseball field and a velodrome where I’ve been a few times for bike races. They are an icon of an era gone by where big companies have a distinct role in the community and a desire to create a legacy that they can be proud of. And, it’s pretty good milk, too!

To make a short story long, I used the yogurt from the previous set as starter and everything proceeded as usual. I took better notes this time and wrote down the time it took to heat the milk to the right temperature — medium heat for 1 hour to 185-F — and let it incubate overnight, at least 12 hours. It gelled really well, perhaps even better than last time. The flavor is somewhat less intense and less tangy than the last batch. I attribute this mostly to the starter but it could be the milk as well. I’m debating saving another 8 oz from this batch and seeing how it goes. Perhaps next time we can do a comparison taste test with an all-fresh batch and one made using previous starter.

Check out this great article that Linnea sent me about making your own yogurt at the NYTimes. It has a really nice explanation of the bacteria and activity in yogurt and how your culture can really affect the taste of your yogurt.

There were a number of minor setbacks, even prior to the actual cheese making, mostly due to my ill planning and failure to read the recipe all the way through.  (All things I made resolutions to correct this year.)  Since we didn’t have the starter needed for Ricki Carroll’s recipe, we used one from The Home Creamery by Kathy Farrel-Kingsley.  While a good time was had by all, the cottage cheese could have benefited from closer attention.  Cheese making, I’m coming to realize, is really all about attention to detail and attentive monitoring.  Not necessarily skills that I’ve honed in the kitchen as I’m more of a throw it all in a pot and see what happens kind of cook.

The milk got a LITTLE hotter than it should have right from the outset, so it carried a scalded aroma and flavor all the way through to the end product.   I think we also rinsed and drained it a bit too much as well as it was very dry.  Even after adding some milk as suggested by the recipe to make it more resemble store bought cottage cheese it just tasted kind of crumbly.  While certainly not our best attempt at cheese, it was nice to get back into the kitchen and start talking about potential solutions and ideas for monitoring the cheese process in the future.  You can check out the day’s events here.

You’ll note some pictures of the cheese plate I served up which was a collection of Iowa cheese (+ one from Wisconsin) that I’d purchased while visiting my family over the holidays.  I was just somewhat interested to see what was available from my home state, like for instance, Maytag Blue Cheese, made in Newton, IA.  Iowa certainly held its own in the tasting, but I must say, that this was my first exposure to Carr Valley Cheese Company, and their aged goat cheese, was amazing.

Kookoolan Farms is in Yamhill, Oregon, about an hours drive from Portland. It’s quite the bucolic agricultural area which is becoming well known for some excellent wineries as well as barley, wheat and dairy farming. The owners at Kookoolan have dairy cows and raise chickens for eggs and meat. They have a little store there where you can buy cheesemaking supplies, raw cow’s milk and farm fresh eggs. I think all of their cheese supplies are sourced from New England Cheesemaking Supply.

The class was taught by Mary Rosenblum, who has been making her own cheeses for over 30 years. The focus was on cheddar. You may recall in the Cheddar Incident of Aught Eight that our first go at a hard cheese didn’t turn out so well. We’ve all been talking about trying again but just trying to follow along in books and figure it out has been sort of… frustrating? Entertaining? Mixed? So, I was really excited about the opportunity to watch someone make cheese who knows what they are doing!

The class was completely full with around 25 people. I wasn’t sure what to expect out of the class — I was fairly certain that it wouldn’t be too hands-on as the cheesemaking process doesn’t really lend itself to a bunch of people all cooking at once. I would call it a lecture style class. There’s a small kitchen and Mary faced us, cooking up two gallons of raw cow’s milk and explaining the process as she went.

She also explained lots of things about milk: what’s in milk, what happens as it converts to cheese, what the ingredients are and how they work together. It was a ton of information but her style is really easy and it was no problem to follow along.

At various times she had us come up to the pot and get a good look at what was happening, showing us a “clean break” and she put out plates of curds in their various stages so we could get a feel for the texture. I took gobs of notes and discovered a few things that we maybe could have done a little better with our cheddar.

For one, we let our milk get way too hot. According to Mary, mesophilic culture will die at 102-degrees. I don’t recall exactly how hot our milk got but it did sort of shoot up in temperature, as milk will do, and stayed quite hot. I have a feeling that we did let it get too hot and that may have had an effect on the culture and the taste.

Another issue has to do with our nifty little press that we made. It’s made out of solid maple and is pretty great. However, the base of it is grooved to allow the whey to flow away from the cheese along the bottom. It makes an adorable pattern like this:

And when you flip your cheese in the press, then you get a doubled-up pattern like this on both sides:

It’s lovely! It’s also a great place for moisture to hang out and mold to develop. Big no-no. We can do the initial pressing as-is but for the long pressing we should bandage the sides (take a strip of muslin the size of the edge of the cheese and wrap it around) and put something flat and smooth on the bottom.

Mary had a lovely little stainless steel tray that she put under her cheese. The tray had a lip that allowed whey to continue to flow away. She also had a stainless steel round that she slipped under the follower. What this does is create smooth surfaces on the top, bottom and sides of the cheese.

One other little component we were missing was Lipase powder. Mary recommended always using it. We didn’t have any on hand, and I believe it was listed as optional in our book. Well, lipase is an enzyme which aids the cheese in fermentation and also adds a lot of flavor and character to the cheese — two things which our cheddar lacked. I bought sharp Lipase powder (they also had mild) at Kookoolan and I’m pretty excited to give this a try. It was $7, and I think I could get dozens of cheeses from the bottle. So, by eliminating the major issues and adding lipase I think we can go a lot further in realizing our cheddar dream.

Mary also put together a big sampling of cheddars for us to try along with wine. She told us a little about each one and talked about the processes which go into them to make them distinctive from one another. It was a lot of information but I really think it was a good class, especially for someone who has already dabbled a bit in cheesemaking. Mary also writes a blog cataloging her life on her own little farm in Happy Valley, check it out.

We used this well-documented recipe from Dr. Fankhauser’s great collection of how-tos on cheese and dairy. We used Nancy’s yogurt because it’s local (and delicious) and is also made only with milk and cultures. We also used this handy digital thermometer that my husband bought for using in beer brewing and with his smoker.

You can set it to a temperature and have it alarm you when it reaches that temp and you can have it read either celsius or fahrenheit. Fankhauser’s recipe was noted mostly in celsius and so we set the temp that way. One of our biggest challenges thus far has been keeping an eye on the temperature and not letting the milk get too hot and burn. Having to remember to check back with thermometer in hand has often meant that we’ve missed it when it has gotten too hot. It also helps to maybe not drink so much wine while cheesemaking. (Your mileage may vary.)

It took about an hour to let the milk get to temp — 85-90 C (185-195 F) — on medium heat, stirring periodically to get an accurate temp reading. I think it went a bit faster when I put the lid on (shush) and just went back every ten minutes or so for a temp check.

After cooling the milk and homogenizing the starter, we added it to the milk, stirring to incorporate. Then we transferred the milk/starter into four quart-sized canning jars, which I had sterilized previously. It actually would have had enough for another half-quart so if you have an extra quart or smaller jar at the ready you may get a bit more.

Lastly, we needed to let it incubate for at least three hours at 50 C. You can find on the market special yogurt makers which do just this — keep the culture at the proper temperature for a long period of time. However, Dr. Fankhauser suggests an exceptional method: using a cooler!

We used very hot tap water and brought the water to a temp of around 47 C. Our instructions warned us not to let the temp get above 50 C so we thought this was pretty good. We let it sit for three hours (closed lid, of course) and it had cooled to about 45 C in that time. We were impressed! This may be the solution we need for keeping cheese milk at temp for a long period of time.

* * *

While it was incubating, Nicole and I made a trip to Bob’s Red Mill. Do you know this guy? Have you been? I had a Chinook Book coupon for half off one item and my friend Leah convinced me that I should buy a 25lb bag of white flour and then trade half of it for half of her Bob’s Red Mill 25lb bag of whole wheat flour. This sounded like a great idea at the time (there was wine) and so that’s what I did. Plus I got yeast, steel cut oats, granola and coarse cornmeal. I resisted many, many other interesting things. So, I guess I have some baking to do….

* * *

When we got back, Nicole and I still had about an hour of waiting so we made some cheese plans for the year and looked up some cheese events and plotted total cheese domination. When that was over, we checked on the yogurt. And… no gelling! We panicked a little bit — okay, I panicked — and then started looking up other yogurt recipes. Most called for anywhere from 4 to 24 hours of incubating. We took some of the cooler water out of the cooler, heated up more water and added that — careful not to go over the line of the jar lids — until it was back up to about 47 C and then left it. Another three hours and we had gelling. By bedtime, they all looked really good (about 10 hours by that point). I went ahead and left them until morning. There may have been more gelling after that but I couldn’t tell. I popped them in the fridge and let them cool for a day.

And here’s what it looked like when I took it out for a test run:

Perfect, I say!

It was very tangy, light and really quite delicious! I may try the suggestion of adding 4 Tablespoons of powdered milk prior to heating to get a firmer yogurt. But, really, this yogurt is awesome. You can also save 8 oz of this to use as starter for the next batch which would save a few bucks.

To see more photos of the process and a little more commentary, go to my flickr set here.

What happened is this: we have waited about thirty days for the cheese to age. Our plan was to cut into it this week. I noticed earlier this week that I could see mold under the wax. Oh noes!!! Investigation commenced this evening.

It doesn’t look too bad though not quite the texture I was expecting. It’s very light colored and has not much of a scent. Luckily there does not appear any mold running through the cheese. It’s firm but not hard. However, when you peel back the wax….

Bleh. Not good. Along the sides there is light veins of mold and on the top and bottom in all the little hollows there is some serious moldage. I cut off the moldy bits and my husband and I both tasted it. It’s slightly tangy and a little crumbly. I can’t say that it is anything like cheddar. It’s not bad, necessarily, but I wouldn’t call it exceptionally good. I think this weekend I’ll carve away some more mold and let some unmoldy bits come up to room temp and taste it that way.

I really don’t know what went wrong. Obviously, it was too damp when I waxed it. Before waxing, I had needed to wipe off a touch of mold and perhaps I didn’t get all the spores. I’m going to do some reading up on this but may attempt the farmhouse cheddar again as soon as this weekend. We’ll see. This is certainly a learning process and I’ve gained so much appreciation for cheesemakers.